The present disclosure relates to electronic devices and, more particularly, to user interfaces for portable electronic devices.
Passwords remain the dominant means of authentication in computer systems because of their simplicity, legacy deployment and ease of revocation. Unfortunately, common approaches to entering passwords by way of keyboard, mouse, touch screen or any traditional input device, are frequently vulnerable to attacks such as shoulder surfing and password snooping.
Shoulder-surfing is an attack on password authentication that has traditionally been hard to defeat. It can be done remotely using binoculars and cameras, using keyboard acoustics, or embedded keystroke tracking software. Access to the user's password simply by observing the user while he or she is entering a password undermines the effort put into encrypting passwords and protocols for authenticating the user securely. To some extent, the human actions when inputting the password are the weakest link in the chain.